Monday, October 14, 2013

Whither phylogenetics?

Some time ago I published a blog post in which I used Google's Ngram Viewer to explore some of the history of phylogenetic nertworks (Ngrams and phylogenetics). Today I use Google Trends to look at the worldwide popularity of some phylogenetic terms in Google's web searches.

The data start in January 2004 and end in September 2013. According to Google, the vertical axis "numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. If, at most, 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for "pizza", then we'd consider this 100."

The first search term is for "Phylogenetics", which shows a depressing trend.

The next term is "Phylogeny", which shows the same trend.

The final term is "Phylogenetic Tree", which looks somewhat better.

Either the people have lost interest in phylogenetics, or they already know about it so they no longer need to do web searches to find out about it.

10 comments:

Interesting observation. My suspicion is that this has little to do with interest in phylogenetics. First, if you were looking at the whole world, then part of the trend probably arises from the inclusion of non-English searches. I also suspect that the internet became more entertainment-oriented during that period, with more searches for games, TV shows, and social-network sites, and less for educational material.

There is, indeed, periodicity to the data, with both an annual cycle and two within-year peaks. This is likely to be related to semesters in the northern hemisphere. I get the same pattern in downloads of my book on phylogenetic networks. /David

Your first link cannot be accessed, so I cannot be sure which figure you are specifically referring to. However, in most of the figures of that paper, the numbers refer to the location within the mitochondrial genome at which the sequences differ from the Human Reference Genome. A position of that Genome has been designated as 0, and the other positions are numbered from there. /David

yeah, it would be nice to have the raw data. Oh well. There are a number of ways that the data could be normalized.

I developed that hypothesis because I saw similar decreasing trends when I searched for some other random words -- except when the word was part of the title for a popular TV show, in which case it increased over time and spiked at the beginning of each season.